Folk Art Is Becoming New Wave

March 31, 1985|By David Maxfield, Smithsonian News Service.

People are still talking about the Moores of Ware, Mass. In their day

--the early 1800s--Joseph Moore worked as a hatmaker in winter and in summer as an itinerant dentist. Joseph and his wife, Almira, had two sons, George Francis and Joseph Lauriston, and two orphan boys lived with the family in its comfortable frame house.

Today, the Moores are greatly admired across the country by American folk-art enthusiasts. The reason is the large-scale oil portrait of them, painted in 1839 by the artist Erastus Salisbury Field (see accompanying story) while visiting in-laws who lived across the street from the Moores. In this painting, family members pose in their finery around a mahogany-veneered sewing table. Almira wears exactly the same gown, pin and belt buckle that her sister, Clarissa, wore when Field painted her portrait.

Admirers of this painting don`t seem to mind at all that its patterned carpet, in tones of mustard, Indian red and dull green, seems to be sliding off the plane of the picture. And in their minds, the penetrating expressions on the Moores` faces more than compensate for the distorted look of their arms and hands. For folk-art lovers, the ``flaws`` of that genre are part of its charm.

Since the early decades of the 20th Century, when several modern painters began collecting folk art, interest in these paintings--as well as in ceramics, quilts, furniture, toys and other objects in the folk tradition--has grown steadily. Though that trendy folk decorating wave of few seasons back may have ebbed, attention to the art by serious collectors, as gauged by record market prices and new research, continues strong.

What appeals to us now about the visions of folk artists, National Gallery of Art Deptuy Director John Wilmerding believes, ``are those very qualities we might wish for our own more troubled times: their uninhibited sense of celebration, their instinct for joining the beautiful and useful, and their looking at complexities with wit and whimsy.``

Once ignored and relegated to attics, American folk art also appeals esthetically to modern eyes. Like much of abstact contemporary art, the older painting often is composed of flat, smooth areas of color, simple forms and lively patterns.

Folk art is valued additionally because it presents a priceless historical record of an earlier time and society, according to Mary Black, folk art authority and guest curator of a joint exhibition of Field`s work at the National Protrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art, both Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C.

Black, who was inspired at an early age by four Field portraits--her own relatives--in her grandfather`s house, feels that, ``for the 20th Century, Field`s paintings are windows that open to the character, taste and appearance of his society in 19th Century America.``

Like written documents, folk paintings offer clues to the aspirations of the nation`s growing middle class. That the Moores and other families posed in elegant costumes rather than workaday clothes is telling. ``Although in reality life was often arduous, most middle-class patrons preferred to be represented stylishly in order to convey a more glamorous image to

posterity,`` says National Gallery education staff member Donna Mann.

Folk artists were more or less self-taught and, like Field, traveled from town to town, often relying on relatives as subjects and for new business leads. Field`s method was hasty, Black explains. He could complete a painting in one day and by the end of his lifetime probably had completed close to 2,000 canvases.

``One is not always sure where the folk painter learned his techniques,`` she says. ``These artists continually painted their way out of corners--and sometimes into them.``

Because they lacked formal training, the most difficult problems for the itinerant artists to resolve were perspective and depiction of the human anatomy. Yet, folk artists were free to manipulate objects in their works to convey certain information--something the trained artist would not do. In Field`s portrait of ``The Reverend Dyer Ball,`` for example, a table is tilted unnaturally so the text of a message can be read by the viewer.

The folk artist also had one up on the formally trained: His work often conveyed a freshness not disturbed by formal standards.

Myths about American folk art abound. One holds that folk paintings and objects are entirely homegrown, 100 percent American. Not so, say a number of scholars. Many of the design motifs, color tones and facial expressions represent a transference to these shores of long-established European traditions.